ICP, yes… but a “Cultural Understanding Course” ??!

My client explained to me that according to their current infrastructure provider, “since we are running a site that targeted the Chinese and had music and culture on it, in order to continue to host he needed to undertake a Cultural Understanding Course or just make a special payment of 10K RMB to avoid it.”  I’m paraphrasing but that is the gist of it.

Something didn’t smell right.  I have never known of any law or regulation in China that can be avoided simply by paying money to someone! 

In this case, it was the ISP asking for the money – not those in charge of the “Law” – which subsequent checking has failed to find any said regulation/requirement.

So what this all boils down to is a local company, trying to strong arm and exploit the naive foreigner.  No such suprise for me, this happens all the time.  The problem is not with the Chinese.  The problem is with the foreigners that come to China, exist here for 1 year, think they are China “Experts” and then proceed to do things that they wouldn’t dream of doing in their own country.

Now such stupidity can lead to being locked up in the extreme or losing a lot of money at the other end of the scale.  And no one industry is immune to these kinds of land mines.  It further proves the point that in China, you do get what you pay for (why are the average foreigners here so cheap?) and that experience counts.  And if you don’t have the latter, be man enough to admit that to yourself, your higher ups and co workers and seek out someone who does know and whom you can trust.  It is a lot less of a loss of face than being locked up or having to explain missing funds, or missed deadlines.

In general, educated people aren’t know it alls when it comes to their doctor and happily seek second opinions and often pay a premium for niche advice.  Why would any rational and educated business person in China operate any different?

It seems some foreigners in China do need a “Cultural Understanding Course” anyway – just of a different kind.  However that course takes between 5 and 10 years to complete and often involves not working inside a bubble wrapped MNC either.

We do have one client though, who has a social media site based around book reviews, summaries and content quality. Well it is a recipe for problems. Today we had a govt take down notice because a book was summarised by some Chinese speaking person somewhere in the world.

Now the content in question was not even on the site or servers – it was just a summary – smells a lot like a certain search engine that is having troubles recently in China (I am referring to google) even though the same search queries on BAIDU return the same results almost and the same … problems….but I digress.

In any case as is par the course for China – if you are going to provide media and content, then you know what the rules are. Like em or hate…you must obey them and basically make sure that if you have a lot of content that you moderate it. Please don’t confuse moderate with censorship. People can always find what they want and view what they want all around the world. But if you run a server in China – conform to the laws.

And if you want to serve the Chinese people, then you pretty much HAVE to host inside China….which means also that you must have a business in China….which means you are already obeying the laws in China…. why wouldn’t your online presence be any different.

I don’t want to sound like a China apologist – because I am not. But I hate the added stress and work because someone got sloppy and pushed their risk over onto me.

Humph!